SAP ALM Partner Conference APJ 2022 – Highlights & Key Take Aways

[Nilabh_]

Introduction:

SAP Labs India conducted one day in person conference called SAP ALM Partner Conference APJ 2022. I would like to thank Marc Thier, Michael Kloeffer and janko.budzisch for such an insightful sessions on Cloud ALM and how it can help us redefining our application lifecycle management. I am thankful to SAP Labs India as well for organizing such a great conference where we could get all the insights about SAP Cloud ALM.

 

With this blog I will try to cover all the important highlights of the talks given by partners, product specialists, consultants who have explored the possibilities of Cloud ALM for their application lifecycle management. So who have missed it can refer this to get an idea and who attended but missed to note down the key take away, can also refer this for reference.

 

Key Highlights:

1. SAP Cloud ALM is not a replacement or alternative of SAP Solution Manager . It is an another ALM tool which is cloud centric and provides cloud based solutions of ALM. As the industry is moving towards Cloud based technology, SAP has come up with Cloud ALM as their new generation ALM tool.


2. Cloud ALM is totally free and it comes with any kind of cloud subscription. Initially 8GB of storage is provided with a tenant and as per SAP only handful of customers have breached this limit.


3. Cloud ALM has by default of 14 days of storage capacity, so customers don't have to worry about increase in data and housekeeping of data. Aggregated data will be available for 365 days which can be used in case of need.


4. Marc Thier in his presentation has clearly mentioned the roadmap for SAP Solution Manager, wherein the standard support for SAP Solution Manager Operations is till 2027, and SAP Solution Manager Implementation support for ITSM and CHARM is till 2030. The support of SAP Focused Run and SAP Cloud ALM will be beyond 2030.


5. Even for Operations in SAP Solution Manager 7.2 and in SAP SOLMAN 7.2 Implementation & ITSM, based on customer specific maintenance, the support can be extended.


6. SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Focused Run are not dependent on the SAP Business Suite, allowing mainstream maintenance beyond 2030. SAP Plans no new on premise products in the ALM portfolio.


7. There are no plans for further releases of SAP Solution Manager 7.2


8. Extended maintenance for process management, test suite, change & release management and ITSM in SAP SOLMAN 7.2 is automatically included in the optional extended maintenance for the SAP Business Suite 7.


9. SAP Cloud ALM is designed to support  ALM for the intelligent, sustainable enterprise, including SAP S/4 HANA(all deployments).


10. SAP Cloud ALM is the next generation ALM platform for SAP Customers. SAP Cloud ALM is an independent new product. SAP recommends SAP Cloud ALM as the go to product for ALM.


11. SAP Focused Run doesn't have Business Process Monitoring and addresses SAP centric service providers and hybrid customers with advanced needs. It can be used complementary to SAP Cloud ALM. Hence, SAP Focused Run and SAP Cloud ALM can be used simultaneously in parallel.


12.  While SAP Cloud ALM- is designed to be sufficient for the vast majority of customers, SAP Focused Run can complement SAP Cloud ALM for the advanced operations use cases.


13. In transition to SAP Cloud ALM, SAP will support us in readiness check for SAP Cloud ALM, Transition methodology to SAP Cloud ALM, Roadmap and Implementation Services, Tools for selected data transfer of solution documentation and test suite, APIs for data transfer and 3rd party integration and Guidance for typical customer situations.


14. SAP Cloud ALM as of in November,2022 has covered almost all the possibilities in operations part and is a very reliable, easy to use and transparent tool for monitoring capabilities.


15. In case of implementation, SAP Cloud ALM is still maturing and customers who needs more custom transaction types and customers using CSOL, Downgrade Protection need to wait little more. It is surely in SAP's plan to bring all those functionality.


16. With Cloud ALM, SAP has partnered with many 3rd party tools like SAP Signavio, Tricentis, JIRA, Service Now, Grafana, Microsoft Teams and many more. In Cloud ALM, for process modelling, Signavio will be used and for testing tool Tricentis will be used. The respective license of these two tools are included in Cloud ALM subscription. No need to buy licenses of these tool separately.


17. As of now, there are few things which are not present in Cloud ALM like upload feature , be it uploading documents, test cases or anything. This functionality is part of future scope for SAP.


18. IT Service Management is not included in Cloud ALM, customers will be encouraged to use third party tool for IT service Management.


19. There are few things which are in white spaces like CTS+, etc and SAP is encouraging customers and partners to come up ahead and fill those white spaces.


20. SAP Cloud ALM has many advantages in implementation part as well. It has monolithic infrastructure, on mature ABAP platform, it supports 2 major releases per year requiring long implementation and test phases.


21. SAP Cloud ALM manages on prem complexity centered aroud ABAP transports, it brings new features every fortnight.


22. It focused on agile delivery with incremental enhancements supporting Continuous Feature Delivery (CI/CD).


23. SAP Cloud ALM is not just a technical conversion, it is also mind shift towards the cloud and new working model.


24. In Operation part, SAP has given two options. Option 1: Move Operations to SAP Cloud ALM, if there is no need for intense system management. Option 2: Move operations to SAP Focused Run, if system management plays a major role.


25. As mentioned earlier, SAP Focused Run and SAP Cloud ALM can be used in parallel e.g. if business process monitoring and business service management shall be used by SAP Focused Run customers.

 

Conclusion:

So as customers and partners and consultant we should look forward to this amazing and futuristic tool by SAP and lets utilize it to full to redefine our application lifecycle management. Business is driven by innovations and customers are moving towards cloud based solutions and in this age of cloud, SAP Cloud ALM can be a game changer and a key player for providing cloud centric business solution.

 

All the best and cheers !!!